Monthly Archives: April 2017

About to perform Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring on two pianos at the Guildhall’s Milton Court tonight with David Kaplan, and remem­bered this journal entry which I wrote for Carolina Perform­ing Arts on the occasion of the piece’s centen­nial. Since it’s not avail­able online anymore, I thought I’d repub­lish it here.

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When I was in high school, a friend of mine got the opening bars of the Rite of Spring tattooed on his calf. This struck me as an entirely appro­pri­ate response to the piece, for several reasons. I can imagine that making a small sacri­fice (a percent­age of skin) at the altar of Stravin­sky could only be good for one’s compo­si­tional devel­op­ment. So much the better that it involved trans­gres­sion of the law (I suspect my friend was not 18 at the time). And the Rite reflected its own badassery on what is no longer a partic­u­larly badass act. For the Rite of Spring is a completely badass piece of music. It’s a musical superhero’s first display of his full powers. This brings with it a satis­fy­ing type of emotional thrill: it’s Iron Man strap­ping on his suit and blasting off for the first time, and our viscera rise in our throats along with him. We forgive the brash­ness, the arro­gance, because in this case it is truly deserved: I listen to the century-old piece of music and think, I could not do that.

What makes matters worse is the poverty of Stravinsky’s mate­ri­als. Like Frank Gehry’s chain-link fence house, it’s employ­ing a brutal kind of virtu­os­ity. How did he achieve so improb­a­bly much with so little? Here’s what I mean: try whistling some of the tunes from the Rite to yourself. Not exactly Brahms’s first symphony, are they? Stravinsky’s melodies tend to encom­pass four or five pitches, not really going anyplace, but circling around the same figu­ra­tions in odd, gimpy-sounding group­ings. Again, it feels almost insolent: look what I can do with this singu­larly unpromis­ing handful of notes.

Stravin­sky wields the orches­tra like a danger­ous weapon, with a finesse that belies the savagery of its sound. An incred­i­ble percent­age of the piece is scored tutti, even in quiet passages, which make them all the more terrifying—a giant chorus of whispers and mutter­ing. The indi­vid­ual parts are also remark­ably inter­est­ing and involved, an especial accom­plish­ment consid­er­ing the vast instru­men­tal forces employed. A quick perusal of the score confirms that, yes, the second piccolo is absolutely neces­sary, and kept quite busy at that; same goes for the second bass clarinet, the second contra­bas­soon, horns five through eight, and so on. There’s a profli­gacy to this sort of ensemble, for certain, but here it’s not a case of mega­lo­ma­nia. Each timbre is thor­oughly uncon­ven­tional, care­fully modu­lated, under­scored, or subverted—it’s not a piece you can hear in your head if you look at the score, because the instru­ments are used in such unex­pected ways.

If all this sounds like a rather cold, unemo­tional piece, it’s because, in a way, it is. Nothing is tradi­tion­ally ‘expres­sive’, in the romantic sense, so there’s no heroic journey from dark to light (or vice versa). Nor is there the kind of harmonic telos that guides a listener through, say, a Mahler symphony. Instead, the dramatic struc­ture relies much more heavily on timing, repe­ti­tion, and layering. In this way the Rite works much more like a piece of mini­mal­ist or post-mini­mal­ist music: modular, not devel­op­men­tal. It’s a weirdly short distance from here to Steve Reich’s Drumming (as well as a short jaunt in the opposite direc­tion, to Elliott Carter). I imagine this was what truly disturbed 1912 audi­ences, even if the sour disso­nances and brash, multi-layered timbres were the more obvious scandal. All these elements would figure impor­tantly in Stravinsky’s later works, but it’s easy to forget just how present they are in the Rite, for all of its sound and fury.

But there is also some­thing which, to me, sets the Rite apart from much Stravinsky’s music—I find it extra­or­di­nar­ily moving. I don’t mean this as a slight to those other pieces; I love and admire them, but in a more intel­lec­tual, reserved way. Faced with the Rite I am power­less to analyze. Perhaps this has some­thing to do with the fact that I’ve been listen­ing to it for quite a long time; it can be diffi­cult to gain an adult-like perspec­tive on the things which defined my child­hood and adoles­cence, almost as if I’m still listen­ing to that music with 14-year-old ears.

I first heard the Rite listen­ing to the radio in the car with my dad, driving home from school. He wasn’t quite sure what it was but he thought it might be the Rite of Spring. Over the radio it sounded like a wild but not at all disagree­able tangle of notes; the colors and the hugeness weren’t lost in trans­la­tion, but I could tell that they were being hemmed in. I bought the Abaddo record­ing on my next trip to New York, at the Barnes & Noble across from Juil­liard. It still sounded like a thicket, albeit one I grew familiar with little by little.

And after awhile, it began to take that powerful emotional hold. Its affect on me has only inten­si­fied over the years; the piece has the odd property of getting stronger with age and repeated exposure. It doesn’t matter if I’m listen­ing through small, tinny speakers, as I was that first time, or to a great orches­tra live in a concert hall, or watching a minus­cule version of the ballet on my iPhone—I find the Rite of Spring hypnotic and completely immo­bi­liz­ing.